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Latest human cloning claims leave sour taste

It’s clone-mania again, for the second time in just a few weeks. This time, it’s fertility expert Panayiotis Zavos, founder of the private Zavos Organization in Lexington, Kentucky, claiming that he made 14 human cloned embryos and transferred 11 of them into the wombs of women.

None of the embryos survived this time (allegedly), but “the cloned child is coming”, Zavos told The Independent newspaper in the UK. “There is absolutely no way that it will not happen.”

Now we have the latest claims. The “evidence” this time is that all the procedures were filmed by an independent film crew. Their footage will be shown tonight on the Discovery Channel.

How much of it is true? Who knows? Still, the whole media circus surrounding the claims and the way that these “pioneers” court publicity always leaves a sour taste in the mouth.

Monumental motivation

It doesn’t help that the latest coverage includes a picture of a little girl killed in a car crash – and whose cells were cloned through hybridisation purely for study – alongside a headline in the paper describing her as “The little girl who could ‘live’ again”.

This perpetuates the cruel myth and widespread misconception that cloning is a way of raising the dead. In fact, if it worked, it would simply be a way of creating an identical twin of whoever was cloned, but separated in time.

Zavos says that his goal is to help infertile couples who can’t have babies naturally, so that at least one of the parents can be reproduced as a twin of themselves through cloning. “I get enquiries every day. To date, we have had over 100 enquiries and every enquiry is serious,” he told The Independent.

I’m sure his motivation to help is genuine, but how much of what drives him – and those like him – is the more mercenary desire to go down in history as the first scientist to do something monumental?

Ethical debate

Whether Zavos succeeds or not, there’s universal agreement among most mainstream fertility and cloning experts that reproductive cloning is too dangerous to attempt, both for the mother and for any babies created.

Experience in animals has demonstrated time and time again that the technique usually fails&colon; many embryos are malformed, and many are abnormally oversized, posing risks both to offspring and mother. Whether it would be “ethical”, if incontrovertibly safe, is a whole new debate. But there’s no doubt that if a cloned baby is ever verifiably produced, the scientist behind it will achieve lifelong fame – or possibly infamy.

My solution to all this hoopla is to send all the would-be cloners off to an isolated island and leave them there with no other means to reproduce except by cloning each other. That way, they could share in one another’s glory for eternity and leave the rest of us in peace.